AI could be India’s largest export, says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

Nvidia on September 8 announced its partnerships with Reliance as well as the Tata Group to bring advanced AI technology to India.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was upbeat about India’s prospects when it comes to artificial intelligence, even stating that going forward, AI could be India’s largest export. “It is likely that one of the largest export products of India is AI that you will produce,” he said.

Huang said he believes this is a golden time for India. “The energy in India has always been great. There's genuine international desire to invest in India unlike any time in history.”

The reason behind this, he was, was that he believes India’s natural resource is computer science.

“I think that Nandan [Nilekani] probably played a very big role in that. It is one of your natural resources. You produce it at incredible scale, and you're incredibly good at it and you export it all over the world. You've got to transform that IT natural resource into an AI natural resource,” he said.

He added that India has the data, the computer science, and that it was only a matter of buying ‘a few factories’.

“We're all going to work together to build some amazing factories here. Then AI could be built in India, used in India, and exported from India,” he said.

The tech talent that comes out of India’s colleges, particularly the IITs, was a common theme in Huang’s answers to questions posed by the media in Bengaluru on September 8.

Read: NVIDIA inks partnerships with Reliance and Tata to bring advanced AI technology to India

“You have the great talent of computer scientists, you produce more computer scientists than any country on the planet. Your infrastructure for producing computer scientists is called actual intelligence. That infrastructure is called IIT. You produce world-class computer scientists at scale,” he said.

Huang said a new type of infrastructure must be created to transform data into intelligence, and there’s no reason to outsource that.

"We should build here, train here, and produce AI here. You have everything you need to build the AI and use the AI here in India, but you need to have infrastructure,” he said.

Read: India needs to have AI sovereignty: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

Huang added that many Indian startups go elsewhere to build their company for want of infrastructure. “In the future, I hope that we have the supercomputers here in India. Our engineers will use the supercomputers here, they will be able to do their AI work -- all the local ecosystem partners, developers, AI startups, researchers, scientists, you just use your own infrastructure. The engineers can stay here, you don't have to go anywhere else to do it,” he added.

“India needs them to stay here. You deserve to have them stay here. Build the companies here. Build your AI here. Use your AI here, he said.

Nvidia on September 8 announced its partnerships with Reliance as well as the Tata Group to bring advanced AI technology to India.

Disclosure: Moneycontrol is a part of the Network18 group. Network18 is controlled by Independent Media Trust, of which Reliance Industries is the sole beneficiary.